How I found out my life was blowing up on reddit--three of you requested this one!

It's been about 3 months since I writing out my thoughts and feelings and I always wonder how much information I need to add before the blogs get boring. I counter that with always wanting to be authentic and have these blogs be a sort of record of my life. But sometimes even writing out a couple sentences like I just did helps get me going. 

Since you all are so perceptive, I tend to go with "too much" information as opposed to little. You'll notice this will get posted in the middle of the day on Monday, meaning I'm not at work. There's a much longer version coming soon because I'm going to have a meeting with my boss (and very dear friend) later in the week. The topic will be what to do with me for the next 9 weeks of the school year. Add to that, we got home very late last night, the kids fought us like grizzly bears when it came to getting them ready for school and my sub is more than happy to work an extra day. I have more sick days than I can use so I'm going to stay at home today. 

From the emails I've gotten, it seems the whole reddit affair seems to still draw the most interest. Which is totally understandable, its where two very normal people very suddenly had their personal lives thrust into a potentially very toxic subsection of the internet. I look back on it myself and still can't quite believe it happened.  When I offered up the idea of having you guys ask me questions or give me topics to blog about, very quickly three of you responded with roughly the same thing: "how do you find out that your husband had posted your story to reddit?" I looked back through my (suspended) reddit account and I can't find any mention of it so I completely understand the curiosity here.

The very short answer is my sister in law told me. 

Since I'm terrible at word economy, the long answer is a little more complicated. I love my sister in law, Addie, more than you can know. She is also so central to the entire chain of events because she is the one who tracked down all the information about the guy which really played into my husbands ideas that I had done things that were bad enough that he wanted to divorce me.  In some of the commentary, people have suggested that Addie should have minded her own business and not gotten involved and I generally agree, I know that her brothers request to dig up information really put her in a tough spot but she was looking out his best interests. Even when I look back on it, the message that had synced to my ipad (that he saw) is pretty damning. Though I consider her one of my best friends, I can see why she felt the need to get involved. 

I'm trying to piece this all together in my mind but I believe this was about 3 days after I had gotten back from the trip. We'd had our massive fight at the kitchen table in front of the kids (something we try to never do), I'd slept on the couch and in the sewing room, Addie had taken the kids to her boyfriends ranch but I still had no idea where he was getting the idea that I cheated. Of course I knew what had happened to me but I could not figure out how he knew anything thing because I hadn't told him and he was giving me the massive silent treatment. 

Sometime that week Addie called me and said she was feeling enormously guilty and needed to talk to me.  That conversation is where I finally started to get some clarity on the situation from someone else's perspective besides mine. When I explained to her what actually happened she was horrified and then told me what she thought she and my husband had figured out based on the guy's responses to her (again pretending to be me). She then asked if I'd ever heard of reddit and I said of course I'd heard of it but didn't know how it actually worked. So she sent me a link to Bubs posts and I finally had some insight into what he was thinking. 

She and I read the posts over the phone to each other and I pointed out all the places where he was either changing details to hide our identity or make himself more sympathetic to his audience. For example in his original posts he said that I had never tried to call him that week, when the reality was I had tried to call him every day until he flat out told me I was bothering him. I was also not nearly as duplicitous as his reddit posts made me sound and the reason he didn't know anything about me going parasailing or ATV trips was because he hadn't talked to me.  I was very angry with him for posting so much about our personal lives, I was very angry that he had not been truthful and made me sound so much worse than I was but at the same time I was so relieved because I finally knew something. 

I created my account because I figured if reddit was helping him, it could help me too. I initially posted on the infidelity subreddit and pretty much told my side of the events hoping to get some sympathy and even advice. (we removed all our initial posts but the comments are still available here to see how people reacted and me trying to defend myself in the comments).  Pretty quickly, people started to make the connection between my OP on r/infidelity and Bub's initial post on r/AITAH. For most people that just added chum to the water. However, there were some very observant people who started to see how my explanations made sense and where his blind spots were which is how we got to actually talking again. 

I think the next question is naturally, do I think the reddit exposure was good or bad. Honestly, I hadn't looked through those comments in months and to be honest most of them are pretty rough and hard to read. However, I think it also comes across how desperate I was for something to change in our marriage and I think reddit may have been that catalyst. So yeah the exposure sucks and it hurts that most people who read our stories will always think that my entire personality is "cheating wife" but in our day to day lives, we are in a great spot. I like to think eventually we would have gotten here without reddit but who knows when that would have happened.